Blonde's Eye View: Wharfers must embrace thermals

A few flakes fall and Wharfers run, like overexcited children, to press their face against the windows to see.

Currently there is a light dusting of white, as if Pete Doherty walked through Canada Park and sneezed. A small, joke amount of snow. Give it an hour and it'll be snowmen in the City and utter chaos.

The hysteria over the snow is easy to explain: we're completely ill equipped to deal with it.

It's not just that the councils don't grit, or that the trains turn into renegade bobsleighs the moment the temperature approaches zero.

No, we as individuals fail in the face of snowfall. Londoners are not cut out for extremes of weather.

We're conditioned to operate within a mid-range, somewhere between overzealous air conditioning and bum sweats on the Tube.

Last October I visited St Petersburg, Russia. It was a bit nippy. I was struck by how the female population managed to hold impressively high levels of personal presentation, and still dress warmly.

It's a novel idea: weather appropriate clothing. It's definitely not embraced in E14.

Mr Blonde was one of a number of office workers who nearly died of hypothermia last year, when he got caught in a snowstorm in just his suit.

I know it's called a suit "jacket", but that's misleading. It doesn't keep you warm or dry when you're being pounded by frozen sky missiles. And it's certainly not a coat.

Wharfers, it's time we pulled our tongues from the cold window and faced the truth: we need to buy some thermals.

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